Boiling Bones
by Merlin Missy
Summary: Every family has rituals.  For the John Stewart's backstory challenge.


Boiling Bones  
a Justice League story  
by Merlin Missy  
Copyright 2005  
G 

Disclaimer: DC/Warner Bros. own the characters. I'm just taking them out for a spin.

For the "John Stewart's backstory" challenge. Thanks go out to XFfan2000 for the beta; Tylure, for the technical assist; Tamnonlinear, for putting the idea (and the title) in my head in the first place; and my sweetie, for following my directions to the letter.

* * *

The warm smells of roasting turkey and gravy hit him as he opened the front door, and John's mouth watered just a little. He shooed Rex inside, then helped him shrug out of his jacket and boots. He heard plates and silverware clatter onto the table. 

"It's almost ready," Shayera called from their rarely-used dining room. "Go wash. I'm sure you're both filthy."

John shrugged and looked down at Rex, who looked up and grinned, a few dead leaves sticking in his short dark hair. Rex was still learning how to catch, and the football had landed in the piled leaves more than once. And since half the fun of piled leaves was jumping in them ... "C'mon, kiddo."

A few minutes later, hands and faces freshly scrubbed, the pair entered the dining room to the sight of a small, golden-brown turkey on a platter, surrounded by all the usual fixings: mashed potatoes in a dish, a small tureen of gravy, stuffing, corn, rolls, and a still-wiggling cylindrical mass of cranberry sauce. Shayera looked pleased with herself, but tired.

Rex climbed into his own chair, eyes wide at the spread. "Wow, Mom!"

John slid up to her, kissed her on the cheek. "This looks fantastic."

She shrugged. "I followed the directions on the boxes just like you said." John kept his wince entirely internal; real mashed potatoes were always better than boxed, but she had insisted on preparing everything today. He suspected much of the reason was hormonal but didn't dare say so. "The turkey was a lot easier than I thought it would be," she continued, gathering plates to spoon out the potatoes.

"You followed my note, right?" he asked, picking up the carving tools. He'd left the turkey marinating for a day in a nice garlic brine and he had written down quick instructions for her before he'd taken Rex out earlier in the day.

She nodded. "To the letter." He caught Rex's reassured expression, and rather hoped she hadn't noticed. There were a lot of reasons why John did the bulk of the cooking in the family.

Something had been tickling at the back of his mind for a while, and only as he went to carve did it finally click. "Dear, the turkey's upside-down."

"The legs are on the bottom."

"Yes. But the wings are supposed to be facing up. So the breast is up when it cooks."

"You didn't say anything about that in your note." He knew that tone. That was a tone that would end with her retrieving her mace from the hall closet and tenderizing his skull.

"It's fine," he said. "Just something to remember for next time." He made the first slice in the turkey, near the spine rather than the breast in consideration of its unusual arrangement. Something else occurred to him. "What did you do with the giblets?"

"Giblets?" she asked, dishing some stuffing onto Rex's plate.

"Giblets, heart, liver. They were stuffed inside the turkey. You took them out when ... "

"That wasn't in the note, either."

John stared at the bird for a long moment. "Oh."

* * *

After dinner, John cleared the table and removed the leftovers back to the kitchen. As he'd expected, it looked as though she'd detonated a small bomb in this rare domestic endeavor, but at second glance, it wasn't so bad; the crumbs and splatters would clean easily with a little elbow grease. The potatoes, stuffing and corn went into plastic containers, the rolls into a bread bag, the gravy into a jar. This left a few bites of cranberry sauce, which he ate, and a lot of turkey on the bone. Also an unexpectedly cooked turkey neck, gizzard and so on. 

It still amused him that Shayera ate chicken and turkey, but she'd pointed out that he ate beef and pork without consideration of his fellow mammals, so he supposed she had a point. At least most of their meals were what he'd consider "normal" in that he could identify the components and they were as a rule cooked.

"Rex, can you come in here and help me?"

"Okay, Dad!" came the responding shout. A few moments later, his son walked into the kitchen.

"You sure you don't want me in there?" Shayera called from the living room.

"We'll be fine," John said. She needed to stay off her feet more, he thought privately. After all the trouble she'd had carrying Rex, John really would prefer she take it easy this time around.

"Get me the big pot, please." Rex scrambled over to the cabinet with the large pots and pans, and brought out the pot they used to make spaghetti. "Thanks." John filled it most of the way with water, then set it on the back burner to warm.

"What's that for?"

"I'll show you in a few minutes. First, we have to get the meat off this bird."

* * *

_Gran's fingers tremble as she pulls strips of meat from the chicken bones. Johnny is quiet beside her, pulling little bits off the ribs with his own nimble fingers, but for all his diligence, Gran still manages to clean her bones more thoroughly. She pops each bone, big and little, into the simmering pot._

_Johnny won't tell anyone else, but this is his favorite part of dinner. Gran's cooking is the best, whether she's roasting a chicken or broiling pork chops, but after the dishes are cleared and it's time to debone the leftovers? That's even better than eating the food, sometimes. The chicken gets parceled out: a dish for good sandwich chicken, and a dish for good casserole chicken, and a hot pot for the skin and bones and finely-diced cooked giblets._

_The kitchen is the warmest room of Gran and Grandad's house, and when Johnny rushes in after being outside all day, his glasses steam up and the whole place is covered in a glowing fog. Add a pot of boiling bones and it's like a wizard's nook, like they're casting spells. They're pulling out of dead bones the makings of the best soups he's ever tasted. It's like magic._

_Johnny's bright enough not to talk about magic, not under Grandad's roof. He's learned that sort of thing gets a boy sent to bed with a sore bottom, ear pressed against the wall to hear Grandad storm at Uncle James about "showing the boy those trashy funnybooks again." It's taken some time for Johnny to get used to the rules here. Mama never complains about what her son reads as long as he's reading, but Mama's in the hospital again getting radiation. While Johnny doesn't know it yet, she's not going to leave the hospital this time. He's going to live with his grandparents until the spring of his senior year when they pass within a month of each other, and then the recruiter who comes to his highschool will tell him there's another way to pay for college if he's strong enough to take it._

_Innocent of all these thing for now, Johnny keeps his thoughts quiet, and only makes up the words to the secret magic soup spells when he's alone in his head._

_The pot is simmering as Grandad comes into the kitchen to get himself some coffee. "I don't know why you insist on showing him this stuff."_

_"I don't insist," says Gran, fetching him some cream. "John's in here because he wants to learn to cook. Isn't that right, John?" Johnny nods. Gran pets his hair and gives him a smile._

_Grandad shakes his head. "A man doesn't need to learn to cook, Johnny. A man just needs to marry a girl who can cook." Grandad gives Gran a squeeze and a kiss to the cheek before he shuffles out of the kitchen with his coffee._

_Gran waits until he's out of earshot before she says, "John, a man who knows how to cook can marry any girl he pleases."_

_"Yes, Gran," he says, sticking out his tongue a little. His grandma is great and his mama's wonderful, but most girls are, well, girls. Getting married is the farthest things from his mind right now. Instead, he tiptoes to the stove and peeks over the rim of the soup pot. Gran always does her big pot cooking on the back burners because when she was a girl, her best friend's little sister got scalded to death by a pot of water left unattended. The kitchen gives and it takes away, Gran says when Grandad can't hear her._

_It's giving now, as Gran pulls two pieces of fudge from the tin and hands one to Johnny. He understands this is a rare treat, one they're not sharing with Grandad,  
and that makes it another secret to mark and keep._

_When they finish their fudge, Gran declares the soup stock is ready. Steam fills the kitchen as she carefully strains the stock into her second pot. Then they go through the bones and the rest in the strainer, pulling off the last tiny bites of meat to pop into the stock. Everything is hot hot hot to touch, but Johnny wouldn't have this any other way. The second pot is already boiling again as they put in the final bits of chicken; Gran will let it boil down another few minutes while she adds salt and pepper and tarragon and sage. The stock is a lovely brown and smells like Heaven._

_No, not Heaven. Home._

_

* * *

_The scent filled the kitchen as John threw in the last of the seasonings. He'd watched his grandmother make the stock countless times, but no matter how many times he'd altered his recipe, it was never exactly the same as hers. But it was his own, he supposed, and when Rex eventually did his own cooking, that would be a little different too, and so the recipe wouldn't go on so much as evolve. 

"What's funny?" Rex asked, his chin resting on his hands.

"Nothing. I was just remembering something my grandma said."

"About what?"

"About why I'm going to show you how to cook."

"So Mom doesn't accidentally poison me when you're offworld."

John chuckled. "You know better than to say that where she can hear, right?"

Rex grinned, as John rummaged around in the refrigerator for the tin of fudge he'd made last week.

* * *


End file.
